they want you to forget

I love New Orleans like she birthed me.

Weekend visits to my aunt as a child were just the foundation; I feel like I "grew up" there because I came into my own in that city. Some of the best years of my life belong to that city. Some of the best friends and people in my life, I met in that city. Yet as much as I love her, I'm not going to romanticize the situation. Katrina is nothing to celebrate. Somebody call that dizzy heffa Kristen McQueary at the Chicago Tribune and tell her that, please and thank you.

This week, amid the hooplah of some media-created "anniversary celebration", they will want you to be enraptured by a fairytale...and to forget reality.

They want you to forget how they left Black people to die there. Babies, old people--drowning in putrid water, baking in attics, sitting on the side of the road waiting for help that never came...while busses transported guests at pricey French Quarter hotels out of the city and out of harm's way.

They want you to forget how they left Black people to die there, while labeling them thieves and looters on the news; Yet white people doing the same thing were called "survivalists."

They want you to forget how they're still leaving Black people to die there--in the city's crime ridden streets.
They want you to forget how they're still leaving Black people to die there--in the failing school systems. 
They want you to forget how they're still leaving Black people to die there--in the school to prison pipeline.
They want you to forget how they're still leaving Black people to die there--in the desert of unemployment and income inequality.

They want to sell you a wolf ticket to the renewed, revived, reinvigorated (read: gentrified) New Orleans. The one that is no longer 80% Black. The one with the Whole Foods and Artisanal Mayonnaise. With every second line they show, every drunken reveler on Bourbon, every "K10Anniversary" hashtag, they want you to buy into the fantasy that Katrina's aftermath has actually made the city better than ever.

They want you to forget how they left Black people to die there. 
How they are still leaving Black people to die there.

I, for one, will never forget.

Help pleas(e)